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Comment by jesseab | Hacker News Reader

It's time to retire the tired old nation-state space-race narrative. We're all in this together people. Their failure is our failure.

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I'll play the contrarian and suggest that a space race is the best kind of national pride. If you're okay with football (soccer) or Olympics pride, this is, in my mind, better still.

And ironaically, as you suggest, when one country wins, we in fact all win.

I would much rather we fight to push back the boundaries of space than to hurl actual bombs at each other.

Nothing could be further from the truth. These folks are fierce with nationalistic and sectarian pride in their vehicle.

https://mobile.twitter.com/teamspaceil/status/11163129311033...

It took me a while to understand what's going on in these comments before I was reminded of the 30 Rock episode where a Canadian character has trouble understanding sarcasm because there aren't many Jews there.

But still, did you all miss the winking emoji right there following the text?

This! While my sentiment may feel a bit Star Trekky/naive, our quest to get to the stars will only succeed if we, as a planet, pull together. If we dont, we'll be limited to this solar system. China, US, India, Israel, Russia (sorry for anyone else Im missing :-)), are all pioneers and we should celebrate their successes, and continued desire to push the envelope.

The issue every single country you listed is that space tech and ICBM tech are virtually the same. Those countries are good at it because they make excellent missiles for war. It is a sad reality. NASA and the DoD work hand in hand together, and virtually always have.

I completely agree. War drives innovation, its a very sad reality. Though in order to get further than our solar system, we'll either need to destroy ourselves, or combine our resources. Some are already trying, and its great. Others have a way to go before realizing this. Very altruistic, I know. Though I think some altruism is needed!

It’s time to retire the ignorant notion that nation-state space programs can be morally disentangled from the governments pursuing them in no small part for political ends. Their success is the regime’s success.

We don't cheer for countries practicing Apartheid.

Indeed, and the Israeli project was a new experiment in low cost, volunteer rich space exploration. Its outcome and repetition _is_ significant to everyone. Indeed, nationalistic associations distract from rather than enhance a project.

And we have a few examples of internationalism already like the ISS. And presumably any Mars mission will have to be international. Which is another one of the reasons such projects is worth while.

Agree to disagree here. The whole "we're all one people thing" is a great idea and all (I'm a huge fan, would love for the U.N. to be something other than the personification of national relations and instead be a real governing body) but that's not how things work.

This is Israel's project. They had assistance from other organizations/countries, but they're not doing this to better North Korea in any real way and you shouldn't hold North Korean responsible for their failure.

Disagree to agree here. It should really be how things can work. We have the opportunity and possibly the unity to get together on a vision for mankind for the first time in history. Obviously there are challenges, but if all people got to vote in their respective democraties for a global push to space - I would be surprised to not see it approved.

> but if all people got to vote in their respective democraties for a global push to space

Isn't that anathema to the current isolationist, nationalist bent a lot of the worlds biggest and baddest powers people seem to be adopting?

Who cares? Doesn’t mean it’s not something we should hope for.

> Obviously there are challenges, but if all people got to vote in their respective democraties for a global push to space - I would be surprised to not see it approved.

My point is that I would be very much surprised to see it approved, as it appears to be the people themselves who have become against these sorts of global pushes.

Yes, it should be the goal, I was raised on Star Trek, I'm just saying that doesn't seem likely.

Should is a dangerous word. Just because you or I think something should happen doesn't mean it is in any way realistic. It seems we're a competitive species, and we rarely do anything really hard if it doesn't offer a chance to be the first or best at something, or to better someone else.

That doesn't mean it's impossible, just that we need something to change the market, not fairy tales about international cooperation. Elon Musk's project to massively decrease the cost of space access is a step in the right direction. I don't think we'd ever get to widespread space activity if we depend on massive spending by national governments to do it.

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